Stinks like rotten Apples to me, don’t those dummies realise that the best inventions are thought up and developed by everyday people in everyday lives and then stolen by big corperations who are too dumb to have the ideas themselves, and then make us pay for a license for the privaledge, Apple should be ashamed of themselve, infact they should just wear an iMask and a pointy hat and call themselves Dick Turpin, I will never support Apple, someone should tell steve jobs that yuppies died with the 80’s, oh and get a life instead of sponging of every one elses, oh and a new wardrobe, he looks like a geography teacher on too much cafeine

Although you have to sign up for this made for ipos licensing program, I don’t see anywhere that it costs anything! Sure you have to sign an NDA, but aside from that there appears to be no payment step required in the application.
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Its similar to how the application development stuff is all actually free, free SDK download after registration, free tutorials, free access to the forums. You only pay if you want it published in iTunes. One problem with that though is that you can’t test it on the iPhone itself, only in the simulator, unless, of course, its jailbroken. ;-)

I wonder if you could buy these kits, sign up for the license and NDA, and use them on a Jailbroken phone? Microchip may not even mind!

I had a brilliant dream last night someone gave me a Mac, then i video taped me burning it and smashing it with the plan to post it on you tube to make all those Apple worshippers weap and rage, sadly i then woke up.

Even if registering for “Made for iPod” and “Works with iPhone” is free (which I doubt, having no further information), building devices that access i* requires you to buy special chips from Apple. And those chips cost over $4 in large quantities. Probably can’t buy just one. However, there may be some hope in the form of Chinese accessories with pirate authentication chips. Or jailbreaking.

But it’s ok, the Yuppies have the Iphone, and open source enthusiasts have the Android phones. I’m just waiting for the first Android Media Player to shove Ipod out of the market. I quite enjoy my Motorolla Cliq, would love to see an mp3 player similar to the Cliq TX with no hard keyboard.

The chips are not over 4 dollars in manufacturing quantities, for a connector and security chip in 5K quantity is is around $1.49.

You must sign a contract, NDA, and file a product product plan, apple runs a tight and anal (no pun intended) program. I don’t remember what the cost of the program is but you do have to pay royalties.

Last time I talked to the Microchip reps these board ship without the security chip, as only people with an WWI/MFI contract can purchase them from AVNET.

If you do manage to get your hands on one of these board just find a Works With iPhone accessory and pull the authentication chip out of it.

The reason you never heard about this until now is because anyone who knows how to do these things would have no trouble bastardizing an iPod cable to use the connector and fabricating their own PCB, leaving them able to integrate with whatever chip they prefer, and probably at $5-10 instead of whatever these kits are costing.

This man is the Jim Jones of technological products. He probably thinks he is some kind of Jesus Christ. His turtlenecks are designed to present some kind of religious mystique to the technologically unwashed masses. I’m sure he babbles about global warming and listens to world music. He is not fit to sweep the floor of Thomas Edison’s lightbulb factory. I hope history remembers him as “that i-Pad man”.

One of the boards pictured is Microchip’s Explorer 16 board. I bought one of these to play around with when I was working on my senior design project. The board itself is pretty good, with one built in expansion slot and room to add a second, and comes with 2 16 bit plugin modules. Lucio Di Jasio wrote a decent book that uses the explorer 16.

lol, maybe someday hackaday can do a post mentioning apple and there won’t be any random “I hate apple but don’t feel like saying anything specific about this post” comments. gtfo, we’ve heard it before.

Why is this on hackaday? This is not a hack, this isn’t even new: Atmel and other companies has stuff like that for more than a year already, so where’s the brillant thing about it? Do you guys get paid by Microcheap???